This essay takes up two separate but related issues: how the courts have resolved disputes over race and schooling and how they should resolve such disputes. This essay is in reply to a related essay, in which another author identified the consequences of what he perceived as a minimalist judicial role and called for greater exercise of…

Discusses developments in school integration from the early 1960's to the present, concludes that all that can be done on the national level is to distribute money and establish minimum standards. "Beyond that, Washington can only encourage state and local educators, working within their own political frameworks, to indentify the best way of…

Presents an overview of British school policies for nonwhite (largely immigrant) children. Charts the development of busing for racial integration and discusses problems arising from the dispersal of nonwhites. Traces the termination of British school policy explicitly based on race. (RH)

Kirp examines the evolution of Supreme Court doctrine since the Brown decision, the course of specific desegregation cases, and the interchange between political institutions and the courts at the local level. He reveals that the decision-making process in school desegregation is both political and constitutional. (Author/SK)

This report attempts to illustrate how courts have undertaken the task of relating the constitutional mandate for equal educational opportunity to the political and institutional issues posed in specific school desegregation cases since the Supreme Court's Brown decision. The first section of the report is an introduction to legalism and politics…